As if to underscore what was happening, the headlines on Afghanistan seemed as over the top as a teenage primetime drama in its third season. The country produced a record amount of opium and heroin in 2006, and now churned out more drugs than the world’s addicts could consume. The UN drugs chief called the drug levels “staggering” and warned that the south was displaying “the ominous hallmarks of incipient collapse,” which sounded fairly serious. The UN warnings echoed those of the head of the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan, who in July had cautioned that Western military forces were “running out of time.” The Taliban were also steadily pushing into Ghazni Province, only two hours away. Efforts at cracking down on the Taliban there would have been laughable, if the situation weren’t so serious. The notoriously corrupt governor in Ghazni banned travel on motorcycles, the favorite Taliban mode of transport. The Taliban then banned travel by car. Many people in Ghazni just stopped leaving home.
But none of this merited much attention outside Afghanistan, not even when the commander of British forces warned that daily fighting in the south was more intense than in Iraq. NATO and the United States claimed to have killed one thousand Taliban fighters in ten weeks—still, the militants kept coming, an endless army.
And soon they arrived in Kabul. One Friday morning, a new housemate and I sat at our dining-room table, sipping coffee and eating muesli with almost-sour milk. We heard a thump, a low noise that sucked all the other ambient noise into it. My housemate, a UN worker, and I looked at each other.
“Bomb?” he asked.
“Hope not,” I said.
But it was. Farouq picked me up, and we sped toward the Massoud traffic circle. The statue honoring Ahmad Shah Massoud, the famous anti-Taliban commander who once led the Northern Alliance but was killed by Al-Qaeda two days before the September 11 attacks, was the centerpiece of one of the ugliest traffic circles in Kabul, although not as bad as the traffic circle featuring a tiny Eiffel Tower near the Sham-e-Paris wedding hall. The Massoud circle surrounded a large monument of two hands reaching up and cradling the earth like a bowling ball, which had nothing to do with the message of Massoud. The suicide bomber had hit a U.S. military convoy near the monument, just outside the U.S. embassy. The target and the timing were probably no coincidence. The next day, the country would honor the fifth anniversary of Massoud’s death.
We hopped out of the car and walked quickly toward the bomb site, which had already been roped off. I saw a reporter from the BBC.
“How is it?” I asked.
“Gooey,” he replied.
Doctors, journalists, police, soldiers—we all relied on black humor. Still, I was unused to major suicide attacks, and his joke made me cringe. The scene hit me even harder. We watched where we stepped. We interviewed people. Fourteen Afghans and two U.S. soldiers were killed, one a woman. Sergeant First Class Merideth Howard of California was fifty-two, a gunner, and the oldest American woman ever known to be killed in combat.
There had been suicide attacks in Kabul before, but they were relatively new, and they were rare. Despite decades of war, suicide bombs had only come to Afghanistan in 2003—before, most Afghans wouldn’t have seen the point in blowing themselves up. Sure, they would fight to the death for a cause. But blowing themselves up on purpose? That took all the sport out of war, and more important, most Afghans thought suicide was cowardly.
This attack gave me nightmares. Merideth Howard was a prime example of the stress that two wars had put on the all-volunteer American military. Because of the need to maintain force levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers who thought they were finished serving their country were “stop-lossed,” their deployments extended; members of the National Guard, meant to be protecting the country during floods and fires, fought on the front lines; and reservists like Howard were sent to Afghanistan. Howard had joined the U.S. Army Reserve on a whim in 1988. After her medical unit was disbanded in 1996, she was assigned to the Individual Ready Reserve, the home of soldiers with no unit. She had gone to monthly drills but mainly spent her duty hours on military paperwork, aiming to put in twenty years before earning retirement benefits.
But for the first time ever, the military had become so strapped that it started staffing provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan with a mixture of navy, air force, National Guard, and Army Reserve soldiers. Many in the reserves were like Howard—members of the Individual Ready Reserve, home also to retired officers and soldiers who had recently left the army. Howard and other older soldiers in her unit, which had arrived in Afghanistan almost five months earlier, called themselves the Gray Brigade. She was supposed to handle paperwork, but quickly found that tedious and volunteered to be a gunner. At five foot four, Howard needed to stand on a wooden box to work the Humvee gun.
I couldn’t let her go, maybe because the attack was the first major one I had seen, maybe because Howard, with her gray hair and kind smile, reminded me a bit of my mother, and maybe because the idea of Afghan girls seeing an older woman poking out of a Humvee struck me as too incongruous to easily forget. So I tried to track down the family of the suicide bomber, visiting store after store in one section of Kabul where the bomber had allegedly lived. I failed—Mohammad is an amazingly common first name. Then I tried to know Howard. Farouq drove me out to her base in eastern Laghman Province—security was so lax that we managed to drive onto the middle of the base before anyone stopped us, and even then, no one seemed very concerned. I stayed at the base for three days, finding meaning in Howard’s hammer, in an unfinished wooden picture frame she was building, in a video showing her as she failed to squeeze the trigger of an automatic grenade launcher while training. Howard laughed when she realized she forgot to remove the safety.
“That could be the problem,” she joked.
Another clip, filmed for a U.S. military video highlighting reconstruction work, showed her serious, standing in an Afghan village, her face pink from the hot sun, just after handing out backpacks to kids. “We have a good relationship with the people here in the village,” she said.
My search was pointless. Sometimes there was no answer to “why.” I had no choice—I had to take Merideth Howard and the attack and shove it all in a box in the back of my mind. Because there was nothing I could do, and I had to work. This became a coping tactic I would master.
Luckily my attention was soon distracted. Another ominous force landed in Kabul, determined to shake up the country—Al Jazeera English, a sister station to the Arabic version of CNN. I had heard that they were setting up a bureau in Kabul, and that they had a lot of money. But I didn’t know they were hunting for an Afghan correspondent. Farouq found out. He had never been in front of a TV camera before, so he sat at home and practiced talking like a TV correspondent to a video camera on a chair. His wife heard him from behind the door, finally asking if Farouq was crazy, talking to himself.